It’s amazing that we’ll be ringing in a new year tomorrow when I feel like I haven’t had enough time to enjoy this year yet! It’s guaranteed to be a time of reflection and pensiveness about what we’ve done with our lives in the past year and what we hope for the coming year but I won’t bore you all with my own thoughts on the matter…mostly because I simply haven’t had the time to think much about any of it. Since lists and top 10’s seem to be the current blogging standard of in-depth self-psychoanalysis, I’ll just leave you with my personal list of things I liked best about 2007. A simple, concise statement about the totally average personal events making an impact on me over the last 365 days. If you’re looking for a less personal take on the 2007 Top 10 List, try out the Time website, they have about 50 different lists to peruse.

And now, without further ado:

Monique’s 2007 Top 10 Impactful Events in no particular order:

1. Benoit’s green card and permanent residency was approved.
2. We found out we would be parents to a baby girl!
3. I graduated with my M.A. and made a really cool documentary about stay-at-home dads.
4. For the first time in 7 years, I began to feel relief that the Bush reign of terror would soon be ending.
5. We made 2007 the year to go GREEN and implemented a total personal overhaul of everything from cleaning products, to recycling to future choices like choosing to go with cloth diapering and organic crib sheets.
6. We bought our first house!
7. We watched the first snow of the season accumulate outside our living room window, dusting everything a beautiful sparkling white just after Christmas.
8. We celebrated our last Christmas as married-withOUT-children.
9. We celebrated our first anniversary.
10. I started my first blog and it actually gets more than 40 visitors a day! Only 2,000 more and I could actually make ad revenue from this! (Maybe this one belongs on my top 10 list of things to do in 2008, coming soon.)

Happy New Year!

Don’t they know pregnant women have Christmas parties to go to? And, don’t they know that even really super huge preggo ladies want to feel thin and sexy when they get dressed for a party? Seriously. There are ZERO options for what to wear to Benoit’s company party tonight. I can choose between my ultra-hip zebra outfit, which I wore on Thanksgiving and now cannot button the same pants…

Or, I can wear a super cute black dress that I don’t have tight enough pantyhose for and which will make my now super tremendous hips look even more super and tremendous. Oh, and did I mention it’s a flimsy little summer thing and it’s about 35 degrees outside tonight?

Ugh. My options look pretty dismal. This ranks right up there with my frustration at not being able to park in handicap spaces when it’s Christmastime and the only available spots are in the back 40 and my hips just can’t take the trek to the end of the parking lot let alone make it past the front door of the building. Oh, and having people tell me I should be expecting twins at my size. Thanks everyone. Thanks for the holiday pick-me-up. Not only will I be attending a Christmas party looking like a lost wild animal from the Serengeti, I also have to endure all the drunken employees I’m sure to meet without the benefit of my usual three-olive, extra dry, Bombay martini in hand. Yes, there are worse things than being the designated driver without volunteering. You can be a pregnant, hormonal, striped, sober target for all the company gossips (because male engineers are actually worse gossips than a gaggle of middle-aged grandmotherly receptionists).

Ok, so maybe I’ll just put on my purple tent, I mean my lavender A-line sweater instead and hope for twin jokes. At least I’ll be expecting them.

I just finished baking Papa’s famous biscotti cookies. Just in time for Christmas and they always make me a little melancholy remembering how he once showed me how to shape the dough. Him with his enormous boxer’s hands, bulging knuckles, pounding and rolling with one hand what I needed two hands to safely accomplish. He would stand back and supervise my teenaged efforts at his recipe, but with much reluctance and fear. And, when he could no longer sit in patience watching my inferior, delicate hands work the dough, I would hear his gruff mumbling and eventual frustrated eruption at my side, “No!, Not like THAT!”. As if the future of all heirloom Italian baking had somehow been threatened by my slightly shorter, more syncopated rolling pin rhythm.

It all comes washing over my memory when I bake his cookies and naturally I hear his teachers’ voice each time I roll out those anise-studded logs, each time I flatten the dough with the palm of my little hands, using double the effort and blows that he would have. And, I chuckle to myself when I catch myself in reply, giving the memory of my Papa the same response I gave him twelve years ago at age 16. “Pa! Pa!” I would whine/shout. “How will I ever learn if you don’t let me do it myself!” And, he would whistle the sharp exhale of a defeated parent, turn around playfully and clap his hands in the air, giving me a floury dusting and a glimpse of that mercurial Sicilian everyone adored. The father I will always adore who taught me how to make biscotti his way.

My theory is that an 8 month pregnant woman, couped up in a hotel room for a week and before that her two-bedroom house not having a final destination to call home, is just quite unable to properly grasp the desperateness of her situation until relief has come. And, that relief, in my case is this house. I cannot even rejoice in its beauty nor lovingly gaze at the view outside my window. All I see are boxes, baby clothes that need washing, an empty room for a nursery, unadorned walls, and the clock, ticking away the seconds the precious few moments I have left before my world goes lopsided again.

Nesting is an instinct for most pregnant women. I imagine it hits us all at some point, save the few who find themselves in survival mode, those in peril or crisis when they should be folding little footed pajamas or knitting perfect miniature hats. And even if moving doesn’t sound like much of a crisis, especially when we have managed to buy such a remarkable house, it really is a struggle for shelter, a mad dash to make sure the roof is in place, the heat will go on, the bed will be made and baby will be safe in our biggest of all life’s basic necessities, our house. Because, that is after all what this purchase was about, giving a new family a permanent shelter, a place no one can take from us, ownership of our evolved cave.

So, I carefully unwrap the glasses, take each dish from its box and find new places for each to call home. This is my little survival instinct, my little way of making a shelter into a home, a place of comfort for that new soul I will soon push into this world. But, it feels like a crisis of a higher kind, a new mother’s fear thinly masked only by incessant activity, the preoccupation not only with compelling loads of laundry and deep pensiveness over paint swatches and fabric care labels but of all those intangible questions of preparation for one of life’s biggest tasks. Survival instincts tell me I have no time to contemplate such existential questions. All I am good for these days is the opening and emptying of brown carton boxes, hoping each one brings me that much closer to a baby in my arms, warm and sheltered, in this new house we call home.